“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your father’s creativity, as mentioned (in other sessions), before, had its side of secrecy, privacy and aloneness. Again as mentioned, you identified creativity with your father’s private nature. The writing self became latent as the sportsman did, yet the writer self and the artist were closely bound. You felt conflicts at times. It never occurred to you that the two aspects could release one another—one illuminating the other—and both be fulfilled. Instead you saw them, basically now, as conflicting. Time spent writing meant time not spent painting.

You believed the painting self had to be protected. For one reason, you identified your painting creative self with your father, and you felt that he had had to protect his creative self in the household from your mother. As these ideas became entrenched, you actually became more concerned with protecting your ability than with using it. You spent more mental energy setting up barriers to protect it, so that any one instance, say, of interruption or conflict, would immediately arouse the power of the buried fear, and become a symbol for it. You learned repression. Therefore, free time was not enjoyed creatively. You could not paint freely in it, for you were so on guard against distractions that anything could distract you.

Because you saw yourself with such specialized focus, unknowingly you blocked out stimuli that as a painter you could have used. Because of your joint ideas—you, the artist, Ruburt the writer—then your financial contribution was strictly limited by both of you to that one field.

After vocally and otherwise objecting for a good eight years, he stopped outwardly objecting. For one thing, he began to agree with you. For another, he was too “proud” to be so humiliated. Did he spontaneously want company, he felt this deeply disloyal to you. He began to discipline himself more and more, trying to fit your image to himself. There were obviously reasons why, on his part, and these, in the past, have been covered. I am speaking of interactions, not blame.

Now. Remember what I said the other night, about the lack of encouragement there on your part. It is highly interesting, considering your ease of mobility, and brings in many more aspects than you realize. For Ruburt, dancing, his one inclination to flaunt himself, comes into direct conflict with your ideas of privacy and secrecy. When he is obviously not in the best of physical condition and then wants to dance, this to you is showing his weakness to the world. You, with your history of athletic behavior, and your love of “perfect motion,” immediately contrast his activities with the time when he danced with the greatest of ease.

There are comprehensions, illuminations, that cannot be verbalized, that arise as a result of illuminations solving problems that on the one hand seem to have nothing to do with the problems. These however are fulfillments quite unpredictable, that come about as you solve what appears to be one main problem. They are achievements that arise out of a given situation, often even while in your terms the given problem may not seem solved.

Now. The psychic work, which is a natural extension of both of your creative abilities, could not be fully utilized by you, individually or jointly, while you maintained such a rigid, specialized focus. Ruburt feared that it might be taking you from your one true purpose as a painter. Not realizing, either of you, your financial contribution through the works, you felt and so did he, after Artistic, that he carried the brunt financially.

If your idea of protecting your talent could be transferred to a plant, you would keep it in a corner, a dark one, in a room in which no one could enter, and spend your time worrying about drafts, no matter how well you had closed the windows and doors.

Your ideas about the letter (to correspondents) are encouraging first motions toward what I am speaking of, as are Ruburt’s ideas about class, and your sexual advances. You have a way to make a living, and a good one. You each contribute. That much will free you to paint, and sell your paintings.